Sand Looks Unbelievably Cool Under a Microscope

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Next time you find yourself walking along a beach, stop for a second and shift your focus from the obvious beauty of the ocean to what’s underneath your feet. Sure, it probably looks like bunch of unremarkable brown sand, and to the naked eye, you’re totally right. Except, the truth is, sand is very much remarkable, at least when you stick it under a microscope. “Every time I see sand under a microscope, it’s a surprise,” says Gary Greenberg. “It’s like treasure hunting, only the treasures are very small, and they’re not very expensive.”

Greenberg has been photographing bits of sand for years. He’s published a book on the subject and is writing another, due out next year. He’s what you’d call a microscopic sand grain photography expert, if such a title even exists. And his work is an amazing look at something we rarely give thought to.

His fascination with photographing sand actually goes back to his fascination with microscopes in general. Greenberg is trained as both a photographer and scientist (he has a Ph.D. in cell biology). While working as a professor at USC, he began to realize that the research he was conducting required a more advanced microscope. The miniscule depth of field in most microscopes wouldn’t cut it, so he began making his own with an increased depth of field, and did it in 3-D. “This way you could see what’s in the foreground and in the background.”

“It blew my mind, to tell you the truth,” he says. “I had no idea sand could look that way.”

Eventually, Greenberg left USC to develop microscopes full-time, and that’s when he really started studying what a microscope could do. “I started looking at all kinds of things,” he says. His brother, who lived in Maui, sent him a film can of sand, as a way to entice Greenberg to come visit. Of course, Greenberg stuck it under the lens. “It blew my mind, to tell you the truth,” he says. “I had no idea sand could look that way.”

This is a fairly typical response. Greenberg’s shots truly are surprising. The sand in his photos look like craft-store beads, not the pile of grains you empty out of your shoe after a day at the beach. But that’s the cool part. Each little spec has its own original story, resulting in a massive, beautiful collage that we can’t see on our own. “You know how they say every snowflake is different?” he asks. “Well, they are but they’re only slightly different. Sand grains are totally different.”

Greenberg estimates at this exact moment he has at least 100 little jars of sand stuffed into drawers in his lab. They come from everywhere: Bermuda, Hawaii, the East Coast of the U.S., Asia. There’s mineral pieces, little bits of lava, biological fragments like sea urchin spines and coral. All of this is ground up as sand and deposited on the beach. “Sand is a reflection of the biology and geology of an area,” he explains.

Right now he’s in the process of gathering more specimens for his second book, which will focus more on moon sand. But he’s still interested in capturing the bit of our universe that we see (and often ignore) every day. “I wish I could carry a microscope around with me all the time,” he says. “But there’s just not enough time in the day.”